Month: September 2021

This whole “fetal heartbeat” thing is a lie:

Newly passed laws in Texas mean that people cannot have an abortion after six weeks – the point where a “fetal heartbeat” appears, and the point before most people know they’re pregnant.

However, doctors are coming forward to say that the “fetal heartbeat” isn’t a real medical point in fetal development, casting doubt on the credibility of the Fetal Heartbeat Bill.

Heartbeats in humans produce thump-thump sounds caused by the opening and closing of the heart’s valves.

However, in conversation with NPR, Dr. Nisha Verma, an OB-GYN who specializes in abortion care and works at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, says that that heartbeat doesn’t exist in 6-week old fetuses.

“At six weeks of gestation, those valves don’t exist,” she told the news site.

In fact, it takes about 9-10 weeks for these valves to form.

“The flickering that we’re seeing on the ultrasound that early in the development of the pregnancy is actually electrical activity, and the sound that you ‘hear’ is actually manufactured by the ultrasound machine.” Dr. Verma added.

Dr. Jennifer Kerns, an OB-GYN and associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco, also told NPR that this noise is simply not a sign of a working heart or functional cardiovascular system.

Dr. Kerns also added that this is a term doctors would use to simplify complicated medical discussions with patients – similar to the term tummy ache, rather than gastroenteritis, or dizzy spell instead of vertigo – and should not be used to make laws.

Likewise, at six weeks post-conception, the correct term is an embryo.

But “fetus” may have an appeal that the word “embryo” does not, Kern told NPR: “The term ‘fetus’ certainly evokes images of a well-formed baby, so it’s advantageous to use that term instead of ’embryo’ — which may not be as easy for the public to feel strongly about, since embryos don’t look like a baby,” she explains. “So those terms are very purposefully used [in these laws] — and are also misleading.”

A number of laws have been crafted to limit access to abortion based upon this false notion of a fetal heartbeat, according to the Guttmacher Institute – but the Texas law is the first to go into effect.

If you want to know how the GOP got so radical just look at the actions and lies of the “pro-life” movement over the past few decades. They wrote the book.

This story in the New Yorker illustrates one of the Afghanistan “counterfactuals” in living color: what the last 20 years of war have been like for rural Afghans who make up 70% of the population:

Late one afternoon this past August, Shakira heard banging on her front gate. In the Sangin Valley, which is in Helmand Province, in southern Afghanistan, women must not be seen by men who aren’t related to them, and so her nineteen-year-old son, Ahmed, went to the gate. Outside were two men in bandoliers and black turbans, carrying rifles. They were members of the Taliban, who were waging an offensive to wrest the countryside back from the Afghan National Army. One of the men warned, “If you don’t leave immediately, everyone is going to die.”

Shakira, who is in her early forties, corralled her family: her husband, an opium merchant, who was fast asleep, having succumbed to the temptations of his product, and her eight children, including her oldest, twenty-year-old Nilofar—as old as the war itself—whom Shakira called her “deputy,” because she helped care for the younger ones. The family crossed an old footbridge spanning a canal, then snaked their way through reeds and irregular plots of beans and onions, past dark and vacant houses. Their neighbors had been warned, too, and, except for wandering chickens and orphaned cattle, the village was empty.

Shakira’s family walked for hours under a blazing sun. She started to feel the rattle of distant thuds, and saw people streaming from riverside villages: men bending low beneath bundles stuffed with all that they could not bear to leave behind, women walking as quickly as their burqas allowed.

The pounding of artillery filled the air, announcing the start of a Taliban assault on an Afghan Army outpost. Shakira balanced her youngest child, a two-year-old daughter, on her hip as the sky flashed and thundered. By nightfall, they had come upon the valley’s central market. The corrugated-iron storefronts had largely been destroyed during the war. Shakira found a one-room shop with an intact roof, and her family settled in for the night. For the children, she produced a set of cloth dolls—one of a number of distractions that she’d cultivated during the years of fleeing battle. As she held the figures in the light of a match, the earth shook.

Around dawn, Shakira stepped outside, and saw that a few dozen families had taken shelter in the abandoned market. It had once been the most thriving bazaar in northern Helmand, with shopkeepers weighing saffron and cumin on scales, carts loaded with women’s gowns, and storefronts dedicated to selling opium. Now stray pillars jutted upward, and the air smelled of decaying animal remains and burning plastic.

In the distance, the earth suddenly exploded in fountains of dirt. Helicopters from the Afghan Army buzzed overhead, and the families hid behind the shops, considering their next move. There was fighting along the stone ramparts to the north and the riverbank to the west. To the east was red-sand desert as far as Shakira could see. The only option was to head south, toward the leafy city of Lashkar Gah, which remained under the control of the Afghan government.

The journey would entail cutting through a barren plain exposed to abandoned U.S. and British bases, where snipers nested, and crossing culverts potentially stuffed with explosives. A few families started off. Even if they reached Lashkar Gah, they could not be sure what they’d find there. Since the start of the Taliban’s blitz, Afghan Army soldiers had surrendered in droves, begging for safe passage home. It was clear that the Taliban would soon reach Kabul, and that the twenty years, and the trillions of dollars, devoted to defeating them had come to nothing. Shakira’s family stood in the desert, discussing the situation. The gunfire sounded closer. Shakira spotted Taliban vehicles racing toward the bazaar—and she decided to stay put. She was weary to the bone, her nerves frayed. She would face whatever came next, accept it like a judgment. “We’ve been running all our lives,” she told me. “I’m not going anywhere.”

The story discusses the uncomfortable truth that many average Afghans blame the US for the violence of the last 20 years. After all, we’ve been droning their villages pretty much constantly. And it also reveals that our “dream” withdrawal in which the Afghan Army did fold and went on fighting for God knows how long, would have meant even more of this horror. That may have been more comfortable for us. But it wouldn’t have done much for the Afghan people.

Yes, the Taliban are backwards, fundamentalist, authoritarian horrors. Maybe they’ve become a little less vicious and primitive in the last quarter century, but we’ll have to see. Even if they have they’ll still be absolutely awful. But so is 20 years of non-stop violence from a bloody civil war. It’s not hard to imagine that plenty of people are just looking for a little bit of peace, even if it’s paid for with some freedoms (which people like Shakira never got to experience.)

It’s a nightmare, all of it.

In case you haven’t seen this Australian TV interview of the nutball Sidney Powell, here it is:

Ed Kilgore at NY Magazine has done an invaluable service by putting together the timeline of Trump’s Big Lie. I’m posting it here for the record. It’s my hope that we’re going to need it when the January 6th Committee gets rolling:

The House select committee’s investigation into the Capitol Riot and the various media ticktocks explaining what Donald Trump and his allies were doing in the days immediately leading up to it are casting new light on an important threat to American democracy. But the intense focus on a few wild days in Washington can be misleading as well. Trump’s campaign to steal the 2020 presidential election began shortly after the 2016 election, and arguably the moment of peak peril for Joe Biden’s inauguration had already passed by the time Trump addressed the Stop the Steal rally on January 6.

A full timeline of the attempted insurrection is helpful in putting Trump’s frantic, last-minute schemes into the proper context and countering the false impression that January 6 was an improvised, impossible-to-replicate event, rather than one part of an ongoing campaign. If Congress fails to seize its brief opportunity to reform our electoral system, the danger could recur in future elections — perhaps with a different, catastrophic outcome.

Laying the Groundwork: Trump claims “millions” voted illegally in 2016

Epitomizing the rare phenomenon of the sore winner, Trump insisted in late November 2016 that he would have won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” He repeated the lie for years and even claimed falsely in a June 2019 interview with Meet the Press that California “admitted” it had counted “a million” illegal votes.

This wasn’t just a tossed-off random Trumpian fabrication. His insistence that Democrats had deployed ineligible (and probably noncitizen) voters led to his appointment of a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in May 2017. The commission was ostensibly led by Vice-President Mike Pence but was more closely identified with its co-chairman Kris Kobach, the immigrant-bashing, vote-suppressing secretary of State of Kansas. As David Daley explains, it was a wide-ranging fishing expedition that caught exactly zero fish:

Kobach’s plan was easy to discern: The commission was to be the front through which a cabal of shadowy Republican activists and oft-debunked academics, backed by misleading studies, laundered their phony voting-fraud theories into a justification for real-world suppression tactics such as national voter ID and massive coast-to-coast electoral-roll purges.

The commission was soon disbanded empty-handed, with Kobach & Co. blaming its failure on noncooperation from states that refused to turn over voters’ personal information. But in MAGA Land, wild voter-fraud claims become more credible each time they are repeated, so the commission was a sound investment in future lies.

Republicans raise bogus concerns about ballot counting in the 2018 midterms

In an effort to spin Republican losses in the 2018 midterm elections, House GOP leaders Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy seized on four contests in California in which Republicans led in early vote counting but lost when late mail ballots came in. Without alleging (much less proving) anything in particular, congressional Republicans suggested skullduggery in what was a normal trend in the counting of entirely legal ballots signed and mailed before Election Day but received afterward. I dismissed this GOP spin, which McCarthy was still pushing a year later, but warned that “all this ex post facto delegitimization of elections that [Republicans] lost sounds like a dress rehearsal for how they’ll behave if they do poorly again next year.”

The president himself made similar allegations after the 2018 midterms, though he focused on two races the GOP eventually won. On Veterans Day, Trump declared that Florida’s Senate and governor’s race should be called in favor of the Republicans who were ahead on Election Night, though legally cast overseas military and civilian mail ballots had yet to be counted. He tweeted, falsely, that these “massively infected” ballots had shown up “out of nowhere” and thus must be ignored:

The Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged. An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!

This did, indeed, turn out to be a dress rehearsal. Trump went on to make almost identical charges about late-arriving (or just late-counted) mail ballots on Election Night 2020.

Trump suggests that voting by mail is inherently fraudulent

As the COVID-19 pandemic spread in 2020, states holding primaries and special elections naturally began liberalizing opportunities to vote by mail. Trump went bananas on Twitter in May, threatening to withhold federal funding from Michigan because its secretary of State had sent absentee-ballot applications to all registered voters.

Twitter, in what was then an unprecedented action, took down two Trump tweets in which he mendaciously attacked California for “sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone … no matter who they are or how they got there.” Actually, of course, the ballots went only to registered voters.

Trump’s goal seemed clear: By asserting that voting by mail is tantamount to voter fraud, he was setting up a bogus justification for contesting election results in any state he lost.

Trump prepares to exploit the “Red Mirage”

Team Trump’s parallel strategy was to get Republicans to eschew voting by mail to ensure that the votes most often counted first (in-person Election Day ballots) would skew red as forcefully as possible (which is why one analyst dubbed the scheme the “Red Mirage”). As Election Day approached, there were many signs that, simply by attacking voting by mail as illegitimate, Trump was succeeding in discouraging his supporters from voting that way, thus producing the desired Election Night “skew” in his favor.

In September, Trump’s hostility to mail ballots and threats to just claim victory became more intense and regular. In his first debate with Biden, on September 30, the plan to contest any election loss was made plain. Following an incoherent diatribe recapping his unfounded claims of rampant voter fraud, Trump was pressed on whether he would urge his supporters to “stay calm” and “not engage in any civil unrest” during the ballot-counting process, which would likely be drawn out due to unprecedented levels of voting by mail. “Will you pledge tonight that you will not declare victory until the election has been independently certified?” moderator Chris Wallace asked.

“I’m urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully,” Trump replied. “If it’s a fair election, I am 100 percent onboard. But if I see tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated, I can’t go along with that.”

November 4, 2020 – January 5, 2021

The Post election scramble: Trump declares victory on Election Night

With Trump ahead but giving up ground in a number of states he would ultimately lose, he made his long-awaited play. At around 3 a.m. on November 4, he concluded his remarks to his supporters by saying:

This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this election. So our goal now is to ensure the integrity for the good of this nation. This is a very big moment. This is a major fraud in our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at four o’clock in the morning and add them to the list. Okay? It’s a very sad moment. To me, this is a very sad moment, and we will win this. And as far as I’m concerned, we already have won it.

It seems plausible that Trump delayed his premature victory claim by a few hours because it initially appeared that he might win legitimately. An “insider” account of Trump’s Election Night activities recently published in the Washington Post aired the theory that his declaration might have been spurred by a spontaneous suggestion from an inebriated Rudy Giuliani. But the many times Trump himself predicted he would do exactly this would indicate otherwise.

Trump’s “clown show” legal team challenges the election in court

A steadily changing cast of Trump campaign lawyers, eventually featuring histrionic extremists Giuliani and Sidney Powell, fired off 62 federal and state lawsuits challenging many aspects of the election results. Most were laughably frivolous, and 61 were rejected on widely varying grounds. The one that succeeded, in Pennsylvania, involved a small number of ballots with technical errors that a local judge had allowed voters to “cure” after a statutory deadline.

There were two big opportunities for a Hail Mary from the Supreme Court, but Trump lost both times. On December 8, the Court refused without comment to hear a claim by Republican congressman Mike Kelly that Pennsylvania’s expansion of voting by mail was invalid because it was not enacted by a constitutional amendment. And on December 11, another shot at the claim that state legislatures cannot delegate their election powers was rejected by the Court on grounds that the state bringing the suit had no standing to challenge procedures in the targeted states (Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin).

By then, the Trump campaign’s legal effort had descended into full farce, as became obvious on November 19 when Giuliani and Powell held a wild press conference featuring outlandish conspiracy theories, including communist manipulation of voting machines. Both Attorney General William Barr and White House adviser Jared Kushner reportedly dismissed the Trump legal team’s efforts as a “clown show.”

Trump tries to enlist Republican state legislators

Arguably the most serious Trump attempt to steal the election involved pleas to Republican legislators in key states won by Biden to dispute the results before they could be certified (the step before the formal award of electoral votes). As of November 21, Trump was publicly making arguments for this extreme remedy, but as Politico observed, it was a long shot from the get-go: “Republican-led legislatures in states Biden won would need to move to overturn their state’s popular vote and appoint a slate of Trump electors when the Electoral College meets on Dec. 14.” The opposition of Democratic governors in Michigan and Pennsylvania would have stopped such maneuvers absent an unlikely court finding that legislatures have sole power to appoint electors. And legislators in those two states didn’t respond to Trump’s requests for assistance.

All 50 states and the District of Columbia certified their election returns by December 9, and on December 14, presidential electors cast their ballots to make Biden the president-elect.

Trump pressures Georgia officials to “find” 11,000 votes

Trump continued his attempt to find state politicians willing to help him reverse the election results even after passing every deadline established by Congress over more than a century to cut off presidential-election disputes.

On December 5, he called Georgia governor Brian Kemp, who had backed the certification of Biden’s win, to ask him to convene the state legislature to overturn the results and appoint pro-Trump electors (Kemp declined to do so). On December 23, Trump called Bonnie Watson, a lowly election investigator for Georgia secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, urging her to find fault with mail ballots since “I won [Georgia] by hundreds of thousands of votes. It wasn’t close.”

On January 2, 2021, he concluded this particular line of election tampering by appealing directly to Raffensperger to find him some more votes. “So look. All I want to do is this,” the president said in a recorded conversation. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”

Trump urges Justice Department to declare the election “corrupt”

Trump was also working the state angle from the other direction, conspiring in particular with Acting Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark to push Republican legislatures to investigate and possibly overturn Biden’s victory.

Clark drafted a letter to Republican officials in Georgia, claiming falsely that the DOJ was “investigating various irregularities” in the 2020 election. The letter urged them to convene a special legislative session to investigate these voter-fraud claims and consider “issues pertaining to the appointment of Presidential Electors.” Clark reportedly prepared similar letters addressed to GOP legislators in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

None of these letters was ever sent out because Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue refused to go along. “There is no chance that I would sign this letter or anything remotely like this,” Donoghue told Clark in an email obtained by ABC News.

The @JudiciaryDems investigation into former President Trump’s attempt to enlist the DOJ in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election has already revealed some frightening truths. Just yesterday, we heard seven hours of testimony from Jeffrey Rosen alone. Much more is to come. 

In recent closed-door testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Rosen said his monthlong tenure as acting attorney general was marked by Trump’s “persistent” efforts to have the Justice Department discredit the election results. For instance, during a December 27 phone call, Rosen told Trump that he needed to “understand that the DOJ can’t + won’t snap its fingers + change the outcome of the election, doesn’t work that way,” according to Donoghue’s notes on the call.

“[I] don’t expect you to do that,” Trump reportedly answered, “just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen.”

Only a wholesale revolt by senior DOJ staff prevented Trump from carrying out the plan. On January 3, the president met with top Justice Department officials to discuss his desire to oust Rosen in favor of Clark, who could then advance bogus voter-fraud claims and pressure state officials as acting attorney general. Trump was informed that DOJ leaders had agreed to resign en masse if he fired Rosen, and the president eventually accepted that the move “would trigger not only chaos at the Justice Department but also congressional investigations and possibly recriminations from other Republicans and distract attention from his efforts to overturn the election results,” according to the New York Times.

Trump attempts to bully Pence into rejecting Biden’s electoral votes

“It is my considered judgment that my oath to support and defend the Constitution constrains me from claiming unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be counted and which should not.” pic.twitter.com/cIZvfCMfnt

Trump calls on congressional allies to block confirmation of Biden’s win

The fallback strategy for interfering with Biden’s accession to the presidency was to utilize the procedures in the Electoral Count Act enabling challenges in Congress to individual state certifications. Alabama congressman Mo Brooks announced in early December that he would challenge selected Biden electors.

Trump promptly thanked Brooks publicly and encouraged others to join him, particularly in the Senate since every challenge requires the support of at least one member from each chamber. Mitch McConnell discouraged his troops from joining the rebellion, but soon enough, hard-core Trump supporters like Tommy Tuberville, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and others climbed aboard the Insurrection Express.

This set the stage for the Capitol Riot.

January 6, 2021 – Present

The Insurrection Goes Live

For weeks, Trump called on his supporters to descend on Washington on January 6 to protest Biden’s election (and back whatever play he could manage in Congress). On December 20, he tweeted, “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election…. Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

By December 30, multiple groups, some of them known for armed extremism, were planning to converge on D.C. in response to Trump’s summons. “Stop the Steal,” a rubric invented by Roger Stone in 2016 in anticipation of a Hillary Clinton victory, became the protesters’ organizing slogan.

As a joint session of Congress was convening to confirm the Biden victory, Trump addressed the faithful gathered on the National Mall. Much of the debate over his subsequent impeachment and Senate trial revolved around exactly what he said to the demonstrators who subsequently broke into the Capitol and temporarily shut down the confirmation of Biden’s victory. Was this the smoking gun from his address?

All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they’re doing. And stolen by the fake news media. That’s what they’ve done and what they’re doing. We will never give up, we will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved.

Or maybe this?

We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.

Equally significant from a broader perspective was Trump’s language echoing the lies he told about Democrats “finding” votes during the wee hours on Election Night, which he would continue to use as a rallying cry long afterward:

Our election was over at ten o’clock in the evening. We’re leading Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, by hundreds of thousands of votes.

And then late in the evening, or early in the morning — boom — these explosions of bullshit. And all of a sudden. All of a sudden it started to happen.

Arizona conducts an endless election “audit”

Even after the failure of the January 6 insurrection, and then Biden’s inauguration, cut off even the most remote possibility of an election coup, Trump claimed vindication when Republican senators saved him from being convicted and banned from holding office again after his second impeachment. Then he and his supporters devised another way to keep pointlessly challenging the 2020 results. In Arizona (with sporadic efforts to repeat the tactic in other states, so far unsuccessfully), hard-core Trump activists in the state senate ordered an election “audit” (a legally meaningless term) of votes in Maricopa County, which went solidly for Biden after Trump carried it in 2016.

This strange exercise, conducted by an unqualified consulting firm led by a pro-Trump conspiracy theorist, was supposed to last 60 days but has now gone on for more than five months without producing any evidence of the kind of irregularities that might call Biden’s Arizona win into question. The idea seems to be to muddy the waters just enough that those who already believe in a Biden “steal” can nourish their grievances right up until the next presidential cycle.

Trump keeps the Big Lie alive

There’s been a lot of media derision about Trump’s postpresidential efforts to wave the bloody shirt of the stolen election. It’s easy to assume the 45th president is just trying to stay in the news or stay relevant or give vent to his natural mood of narcissistic grievance and vengeance. However, the damage he is doing to the credibility of democratic institutions among Republican rank-and-file voters and conservative activists is not fading but is being compounded daily.

It’s entirely plausible that Trump or some authorized successor will build on the lies he deployed so regularly during the 2020 election cycle and plan a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose response to whatever happens on November 5, 2024, as I argued in April 2021:

If you begin not with the assumption that Trump’s entire effort to steal the election was absurd but regard it as an audacious plan that wasn’t executed with the necessary precision, then reverse engineering it to fix the broken parts makes sense …

And the really heady thing for Trump is knowing how easy it was to convince the GOP rank-and-file base that his lies were the gospel truth.

Put together shrewd vote suppressors, audacious state legislators, emboldened conservative media, a better slate of lawyers, a new generation of compliant judges, and quite possibly a Republican-controlled Congress, and the insurrection plot could finally succeed.

It's not the entire answer but COVID policy views are much more polarized along ideological lines in the US than elsewhere.

In that sense I'm not sure the issue is misinformation so much as people making (sometimes costly and/or irrational) expressions of political identity. https://t.co/kc4sevUJOF pic.twitter.com/ZRpiF5eckr

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) September 6, 2021

Aaaand, in the US vaccine and mask refusal is being pushed by cynical political insterest.

Of course it is.

There is a school board meeting for Manatee County, FL tomorrow night. This was just put out by a local MAGA group, whose leaders have been trained by national organizers on how to disrupt them. Read especially the highlighted part. This is what they are doing everywhere. pic.twitter.com/KMoRzIgLU2

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) September 6, 2021

One study demonstrated that the presence of a meatpacking plant in a county relative to another without one “increased per capita Covid-19 infection rates by 110 percent. The study estimated that 334,000 Covid infections in the United States were attributable to beef, pork and chicken processing plants.”

Close quarters and inadequate ventilation mean someone else’s shitty job can be hazardous to your health as well, writes Terri Gerstein, a fellow at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and the Economic Policy Institute.

Inadequate staffing ratios in hospitals contribute to increased infection rates for patients, Gerstein writes in the New York Times:

A study published this year found, on the other hand, that increased minimum wages reduced inspection violations, adverse health conditions, and mortality among nursing home residents, by decreasing turnover and improving continuity of care. And during the pandemic, researchers found that unionized nursing homes had lower Covid-19 mortality rates than those without unions.

Out on the highways, the low pay of truck drivers and long hours they work to earn more has created real dangers. In 2019, 5,005 people were killed and 159,000 injured in crashes involving large trucks.

Rules allowing drivers to work long hours without adequate rest mean that when “truck drivers are underpaid and overworked, it’s bad for them and also bad for us.”

Researchers have found interesting connections between poor working conditions and seemingly unrelated social problems. For example, most people don’t think of the opioids crisis as a labor-related issue, but research has shown a connection between occupations with high workplace injury rates, like construction, and opioid overdose fatalities. (People get injured on the job; lacking sick days, they take opioids so they can work through the pain.)

At the same time, improved working conditions are correlated with a number of seemingly unrelated social benefits, from a reduction in the incidence of low-birth weight babies to a decrease in suicide rates. Unionization has been shown to increase civic participation, reduce the racial wealth gap and lessen racial resentment among white workers.

Perhaps the reporting community should promote this message in all those red-state diners they frequent.

“We should care about workers’ rights as a matter of social justice and basic humanity,” Gerstein argues. “When new laws are considered, labor shouldn’t be seen as one more special interest group.” Everyone holds a stake in improved working conditions and a stable economy.  

What holds everyone back is how tight a grip avarice, cutthroat capitalism, and “the monetize-everything-you-have economy” has on our culture. Having a decent-paying job that contributes to us all and breeds self-respect is laudable. But it is in no way how we measure worth anymore. How much income any activity can bring has become the measure if its worth in this society, even if it’s making money with money to little social benefit. Metastasized capitalism is exploitive capitalism and needs to be brought to heel. The economy should serve people. not the other way around. But that’s not how it works today.

Many Americans lately it seems are flag-wrapped and hostile. The America they want to be “great again” is some vague construct more about tribe than “created equal” or “with justice for all” or e pluribus unum. And certainly not “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

But Afghan refugee resettlement has reawakened that last bit in some of us in what may constitute “one of the largest mass mobilizations of volunteers since the end of the Vietnam War,” the New York Times reports:

In rural Minnesota, an agricultural specialist has been working on visa applications and providing temporary housing for the newcomers, and she has set up an area for halal meat processing on her farm. In California, a group of veterans has sent a welcoming committee to the Sacramento airport to greet every arriving family. In Arkansas, volunteers are signing up to buy groceries, do airport pickups and host families in their homes.

“Thousands of people just fled their homeland with maybe one set of spare clothes,” said Jessica Ginger, 39, of Bentonville, Ark. “They need housing and support, and I can offer both.”

Perhaps in helping others not already among one or the other major political tribes in this country, we can find ourselves again.

“Even the most right-leaning isolationists within our sphere recognize the level of responsibility that America has to people who sacrificed for the nation’s interest,” said Caleb Campbell, chief pastor of Desert Springs Bible Church, an evangelical megachurch in the Phoenix suburbs.

Parishioner Mars Adema, 40, tried over the last year to orient church ministries to caring for immigrants, only to be rebuffed. “With Afghanistan, something completely shifted,” Ms. Adema said.

How long the welcome will last is unknown. Xenophobia is one of the conservative echo chamber’s most potent marketing tools. Polls show Republicans less likely to extend a hand in welcome than Democrats, the Times adds.

But a broad array of veterans and lawmakers have long regarded Afghans who helped the United States as military partners, and have long pushed to remove the red tape that has kept them in the country under constant threat from the Taliban. Images of babies being lifted over barbed-wire fences to American soldiers, people clinging to departing planes and a deadly terrorist attack against thousands massed at the airport, desperate to leave, have moved thousands of Americans to join their effort.

“For a nation that has been so divided, it feels good for people to align on a good cause,” said Mike Sullivan, director of the Welcome to America Project in Phoenix.

Resettling Afghan allies and their families is bringing out the American in Americans.

Public opinion surveys have shown broad support for resettling Afghan refuges. In a Washington Post-ABC News poll released on Friday, 68 percent said they supported taking in refugees who had been subjected to security review, and 27 percent opposed it. The support included 56 percent of Republicans. Volunteer agencies said the community mobilization has crossed traditional political dividing lines.

“We have never seen anything like it,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the chief executive of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, a resettlement agency that has affiliates in 22 states.

CBS News reports that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas expects “over 50,000 Afghan evacuees, including U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, visa holders, applicants for special immigrant visas (SIVs) and others at risk” will need help resettling, including “journalists, and vulnerable women and girls.”

Of the thousands now housed in Europe awaiting transport to the U.S., only one has “popped red” in their security screening, General Tod Wolters, the head of U.S. European Command, tells reporters. That person remains in custody under scrutiny and is not considered high threat.

In Wisconsin, in Texas, and elsewhere, Americans are stepping up to provide aid to Afghan families who receive $1,200 per person from the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants for helping get started on new lives. The cash must be spent within 90 days. It is not a lot for finding housing and work in this (mostly) English-speaking country when starting from nothing.

“We also take some of that money to buy grocery cards and provide families with a little cash for any additional expenses that come up,” says Marisol Girela, associate vice president for social programs for RAICES, the San Antonio, Texas-based nonprofit providing immigrant resettlement and legal representation services.

“This is where donations really make a difference,” Girela said. “The more we get from people — a free sofa or canned food — the more of their own money they can keep.”

Relief agencies themselves are underfunded and understaffed for handling the influx after the Trump administration slashed immigration and cut resources for resettlement during its tenure.

In Phoenix, evangelicals are finding common ground on the issue. For now (the Times again):

Jason Creed, chairman of the board of Desert Springs Bible Church, said he had not heard complaints about the fund-raising drive for refugees.

“This is an issue where vaxxers and anti-vaxxers meet,” said Mr. Creed, a tax lawyer.

The church is part of a newly formed coalition of churches in Phoenix that has committed to provide families with groceries, household supplies and furniture as well as assistance navigating the bus system and filling out job applications.

“At the core of our mission is loving our neighbors,” Pastor Campbell said. “Which is not a one-time event.”

Where that occurs, it is a case of Americans showing more compassion for foreigners than they do for neighbors a few blocks or the next county over. Here’s hoping the lesson will stick.

The Daily Beast reports:

The sculptor Gutzon Borglum put George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem added Donald Trump—to a replica of the massive granite monument that she commissioned and then presented when he delivered a speech at a controversial Mount Rushmore celebration on July 3, 2020.

The piece has never been publicly seen and little was known about it beyond a disclosure filing with the Office of Government Ethics that indicated it cost $1,100, which Noem’s office said was paid for by private donors.

But the Daily Beast has obtained a photo of the replica, which as The New York Times first reported, does indeed depict Trump carved into the Lakota people’s sacred Black Hills, right next to Lincoln’s face.

Trump reportedly wished that his mug could be added to the real thing, but Noem, of course, could not make that happen. Instead she found donors to underwrite the smaller ego-stroking project.

Noem’s staff then contacted Dallerie Davis, a Rapid City art agent and Realtor who serves as a liaison for several sculptors in the state, according to Davis and another person familiar with the inner workings of Noem’s office who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Noem’s camp wanted to know: was it possible to create a Mount Rushmore figurine with Trump attached—and do so in about a month?

Davis told The Daily Beast she thought of Lee Leuning and Sherri Treeby, a South Dakota sculpting team with scores of pieces on display in the state and across the Midwest. (They have even been contracted to sculpt a Johnny Carson statue for the late Tonight Show host’s hometown of Norfolk, Nebraska, though sculpting work on that project has yet to begin.)

Leuning and Treeby were good, could work fast and, perhaps best of all, they were Trump supporters, Davis said.

Employing what’s known as “lost wax” casting, an ancient process that uses a clay model, hot wax and molten bronze, the duo grafted a bust of Trump in a suit and tie onto the mini-Rushmore.

Three copies were created, Leuning and Treeby revealed recently, with one going to Trump, and the other two to the unidentified donors—the names of whom are unknown even to them.

The pieces are “bookshelf-sized,” Leuning told the Daily Beast—27 inches wide, 12 inches high, and 8-1/2 inches deep.

The partners, who work out of Bad River Artworks in Aberdeen, said they were asked to remain quiet about the project, and this is the first time their names have been disclosed.

Trump must have loved the fact that his head was twice the size of the others.

But seriously, this is sick. It’s not normal. It’s Kim Jong Un stuff.

And I do mean party:

You can do an entire semester of cultural anthropology just on what I’m seeing right now. And it hasn’t even started yet. pic.twitter.com/1aq3qqi9u1

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) September 5, 2021

That’s from a “boat parade” in Florida today, the political purpose of which is unclear. It seems they just want to get together and scream about Trump. (Apparently Roger Stone was there asking for money but I don’t know that that’s what drew anyone to this thing.)

I don’t think you can over-estimate the pull of the tribal/social identity of being a Trump voter. They’re having fun. It’s like a Dead Concert for wingnuts and just like the Deadheads, the MAGAhead gatherings are about themselves as much as they are about hearing their favorite tunes.

Trump gave these people an identity and now it is an official subculture. The question is, how big of a subculture is this? And how many people who don’t attend these get-togethers, wish they could?

John Fund (where has he been lately?) makes the case that the recall of Gavin Newsom will be a disaster for the whole country. He doesn’t think he’s making that case, but he is:

Democrats are in panic mode over the possible recall of California Gov. Gavin Newsom.  

Opponents have raised over $80 million to fight the September 14 recall — seven times more than what supporters of the recall have done. Public employee unions are the biggest contributors to Newsom, but George Soros is in for more than $1 million.

The anti-recall, pro-Newsom campaign has deployed 700 staffers to target 10.3 million voters and take advantage of California’s 2016 legalization of ballot harvesting — which allows political operatives to pick up and deliver mail-in ballots.  

What Democrats are worried about in part is that if the recall succeeds in a state as blue as California it could have the kind of impact that Republican Scott Brown’s upset victory in a special election for Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat had in 2010.  That shock result killed any chance of Congress passing a carbon tax and it weakened the final version of ObamaCare, almost leading to the capsizing of the entire bill.

The details of President Biden’s $3.5 trillion spending extravaganza are likely to be unveiled the same week of the recall.  If Newsom is turfed out of office, Biden’s bill could be threatened by such a raw demonstration of public anger with liberal governance.

Voter anger in the hinterlands did kill a “comprehensive” immigration amnesty bill in 2014.  GOP House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was defeated in a stunning primary upset by Dave Brat, an unknown economics professor, who tagged Cantor as a closet supporter of amnesty.  After Cantor’s defeat, any immigration bill was a non-starter.

If the recall succeeds, Kaus asks:  “What Democratic pol wants to make himself one of the Newsoms of 2022 by passing Biden’s budget-busting agglomeration of still more liberal policy dreams (including, at the moment, another amnesty)?’ 

Kaus believes that the candidacy of Larry Elder, the radio talk show host who leads in all the polls in the electionthat would select Newsom’s replacement if he were recalled, is  “significant because it’s a missile aimed at the Biden New Deal.”

I don’t think you needs any more than that to motivate you to vote, do you?

The polls showing Elder as the opposition “frontrunner” has him at about 20%. It’s only because of this ridiculous recall law that he could win the election if Newsom fails to get a majority.

Here’s our future Governor if Mickey Kaus has his way:

If you haven’t mailed in your ballot, do it now.

A COVID update from Andy Slavitt. He says that Dr. Fauci thinks the booster shots will mean that vaccinated people can’t transmit the virus at all. But sadly, they don’t expect people to get them which is just pathetic.As is the fact that our refusniks are showing America to be idiots. As usual:

COVID Update: Over the long term the US could be among the countries with the highest cases, greatest risks of outbreaks, and largest home to new variants.

With people refusing vaccinations here, the globe is lapping the US very quickly.

We’ve now given out 5.4 billion shots across the globe.

45 countries, almost all of whom began well after the US, have now fully vaccinated more of their population than the US.

Our low vaccination rates relative to the globe has put the US up there with 3-4 mostly unvaxxed nations as a leading hot spot.

And because of our lower vaccination rate, unlike other early vaccinated countries like Israel & the UK, US death rates are 2-3x higher.

Countries which have been notably lagging behind in much of the world are vaccinating quickly.

India, which was plagued with low access to vaccines has now given a first shot to more than half the population. Japan now has 58%. Australia 50%. Brazil 2/3.

We’re giving a billion shots a month around the globe. And from all of this effort global cases are now declining.

But 90 countries, most in Africa, S America, or South Asia have fewer than 40% of their populations with a single dose. 40 of those are under 10%. 3 have not even begun.

None these countries is in the top half of global wealth.

We are producing a billion doses/month now and COVAX has promised that 2 billion will be delivered to poor countries by the end of the year.

The math suggests we have more than enough vaccines to vaccinate 70% of the globe with at least a 1st shot in a manner of months.

But there are big challenges. The challenge doesn’t lie in producing enough vaccines. It lies in the hardest part— the infrastructure, distribution, cold storage & supplies to vaccinate many of the poorer countries.

The global pace of vaccinations will decrease as soon as the middle income countries get through their vaccinations in major urban centers— unless these infrastructure issues are resolved.

Rural & remote areas and poor countries require mobilization of resources now.

PEPFAR infrastructure (used for AIDS 2 decades ago), childhood vax infrastructure, tens of 1000s of UN/G7 troops all must be quickly mobilized.

The UN and G20 must put aside differences and make this the priority. The IMF must ensure funds are used for these purposes alone.

September is the month when the coordination, resources, supply chain production & financing must get worked out. 1

I talked to several scientists, including Dr. Fauci who will be on @inthebubblepod next week, who believe that with a booster shot, it is very likely that vaccinated people will no longer be able to be contagious.

But even when the US provides boosters, take up rates are expected to be low. Even lower than the already sadly low vaccination rates.

Between global vaccinations, expanded vaccinations in the US, and boosters, we have the tools to reduce COVID-19 significantly & minimize the risk of other variants.

But of those, the work in the US, while less complicated technically, may be the most problematic.

Belief in science, support for working people, uniting for a common cause, and a unified governing system are ingredients for higher vaccination take up.

The US failure here portends the risk of variants & outbreaks.

With commitment, global equity & infrastructure issues can be overcome. And it needs to happen fast.

And as they are, more & more countries will pass the US on vaccination levels. Our issues may be harder. And the US (& the world) will pay a price for them.

Originally tweeted by Andy Slavitt 🇺🇸💉 (@ASlavitt) on September 4, 2021.